Data-driven decisions are better decisions, which means you need detailed data. Custom Reports can give you the detailed data you need to confidently make those decisions.
Custom Reports lets you create reports that give you a complete view of marketing and sales to help discover trends, areas of opportunity, and grow your business with the specific data you need.
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What are Custom Reports?
Custom reports help you analyze information and answer specific questions you may have around data or specific activities. When you create a custom report, you can save it to your account. A saved report can be accessed at any time, shared with another account user, or downloaded.
The data for your custom reports is refreshed once daily around 5:30 am CST/11:30 UTC (times will differ for respective time zones).
Where do I find Custom Reports?
To access Custom Reports:
- Log into your ActiveCampaign account.
- Click "Reports" on the left menu.
- Click "Custom Reports."
- When you land on the Custom Reports page, you will be looking at an Explore panel.
To become familiar with the dashboard terminology, you can reference this Custom Reports Terminology article.
What's in the Custom Reports Explore panel?
To start, look at the left side of the panel. You will see a list of tables. These tables can be used to create custom reports. There is the:
- Automation table
- Campaigns table
- Contacts table
- Deals table
- Ecommerce table
Each table is split into two subcategories: Dimensions and Measures.
Dimensions are static fields that define the name of what the header will be in the reporting spreadsheet.
Measures are fields that you want to calculate which will align to a specific dimension.
If you’re wondering what each measure means, you can hover over the little “I” icon at each for more information.
Custom Reports use cases
Custom reports give you valuable insights into your customers to help you make better business decisions. Some use cases of custom reports include:
- See a list of a contact's engagement behaviors segmented by campaign/automation attributes (ie: campaign name)
- See the average commitment time of a contact who unsubscribed for a particular campaign/automation
- See the opens of an automation email, filtered by custom contact field value in a specific date range
- Use new measures across campaigns, automations, and contact data; this includes numbers such as total campaign send, campaign engagement metrics, total automations completed, and more
- Easily share reports across your team
- Use report templates to better understand how to build your own reports
Custom Reports FAQs
What can I report on in Custom Reporting?
ActiveCampaign offers reporting on the following areas:
- Contacts
- Deals
- Automations
- Campaigns
- Ecommerce
We also let you cross join data from these areas so you can create, for example, a report that displays the list of unique emails (Contacts) who have opened an email (Campaigns) in a specific time range.
Note that Deals does not include reporting options for Tasks.
How do I create a report based on contact or deal custom fields?
Custom Fields in Custom Reporting are described by the following dimensions:
- Custom Fields: the actual field that you want to report on.
- Custom Field Values: the values that are within a field that are assigned to a specific contact.
In order to create a report based on a field called Lead Source, with values of Website, Organic, and Referral, you will need to do the following:
- Under the Dimensions tab, click to add the "Custom Field Values" dimension to your dataset from the left-side dropdown menu.
- Add a measure, like "Count."
- Add a Filter to isolate the specific field you would like to report on, like "Lead Source."
- Run the report.
Your end result should be a table with the count of contacts that you have with each individual Lead Source (Website, Organic, Referral). You can then select any visualization that you would prefer to represent this dataset.
Can I apply filters to a Dashboard that I have created?
Yes. When you look at a Dashboard you have created, you can click "Edit" and then click "Filters" at the top of the Dashboard. This will let you apply various filters to any of the reports on the Dashboard that you have created.
What does using a Pivot on my report mean?
Using a Pivot on a report lets you report on multiple dimensions, rather than a singular dimension.
As an example, a singular dimension report may be the Count of Deals with a specific Forecasted Close Date, in which your table will display rows of Dates with a count beside each.
If you wanted to add a Deal Owner to this singular dimension report, you would likely want to add this as a Pivot to break down the Count of Deals by Date and by Owner. Your table would then have a row of dates with counts and dates. However, each row will now have a unique column (and count) for each individual owner.
What are filter-only dimensions and what are they used for (i.e. cross join)?
Filter-only dimensions can only be added to reports as Filters. More specifically, they let you to create reports that cross joins data across multiple areas of Custom Reporting (also known as a cross join).
For example, if you wanted to create a list of email addresses (Contacts) who have opened an email (Campaign) within a specific date range, you are referencing two different tables: Contacts and Campaigns. Adding a Filter-only dimension of Campaign Relationship Type, will allow you to select the type of relationship that the Contact has with a given Campaign.
In this case, you would add a Filter of Campaign Relationship Type = Opens and a Filter for your Event Date. Then you would add email address as a dimension and run your report. This would give you a list of email addresses that have opened an email within the date range you filtered by.
How do I share reports with my team?
ActiveCampaign does not offer specific share links to any given report that is created in Custom Reporting. To view a report, you must have access to Custom Reporting as a whole.
However, there are 3 types of Looks and Dashboards, some of which you can share with multiple users:
-
Personal
Only viewable by the user who creates them. -
Group
Accessible by all users who have access to Custom Reporting. -
Shared
Created and administered by ActiveCampaign for your reference to be used as guides for how to leverage Custom Reporting.
You can choose which of the types you would like to set your report as when you create any Look or Dashboard.